Article Surfing Archive

The search tricks that I am going to show you in this article are a combination of different media searches that search engines have and some search strings. Utilizing these methods that I am going to show you will bring back results of the media files you want to find on a particular webpage that you are reading. Such as audios, videos, PDF's, images, and flash presentations. For the purpose of this article I am going to use one site and show you how to find all of the different media files within. The site I am going to use is www.incredible-adventures.com, this is a extreme vacation/adventure website, other than it being a cool site the reason I am using it is because this website contains all of the media files above.

Images

Google is the best search engine to use to help you find the images on a page, it has its own image search called Google Images. You can find Google Images simply by going to google.com and selecting the images link above the normal search box(very easy to find). Once your within Google Images the only results returned when you search here are images relating to your search term. Now this is a great way to find images on almost anything you search for, but were going to take it one step further. Were going to find only the images that are within a specific site, which can be any site you would like. For the sake of this article though I said we were going to use the incredible adventures site. To perform this search you type in site:www.incredible-adventures.com. By adding the site: directly followed by the web address this will only return images within that website. Go ahead and give this a try using the incredible adventures site and you will see that there are 2,300 images throughout the entire site. This can drastically cut down the time it might normally take you to search for images on a website of your choice.

Audio

Audio is becoming quickly a very popular way to get a message across on the internet. Many more sites nowadays have different audio files available. For this search we are going to use the search engine AltaVista. When you get to the homepage of AltaVista you will see you can perform a MP3/Audio search. This works the same exact way as the Google Images trick does. You type in site:www.incredible-adventures.com (or whatever site you want to look through) and you get back only the audio files contained on the website. With my incredible adventures example it only returns one audio file. But go ahead and try it just so you can understand what I'm saying and see for yourself how it works.

Videos

For videos I find the best search engine to use in Yahoo. Same thing applies here as the previous two tricked I discussed. Once at Yahoo.com click to search through videos. Now type in again site:www.incredible-adventures.com bearing only the video files within that website. Go try this with my incredible adventures example and you will get 47 videos returned.

PDF's

Again we return Google, which I find being the best search engine for the next trick. This is how to find any PDF documents that a site may contain. Within the search box you type filetype:pdf site:www.incredible-adventures.com ( or again whichever site you want to find PDF documents in). If you use my incredible adventures example above you will notice it returns 62 different PDF documents within that website. Incredible Adventures has a PDF document on every single on of their adventure vacations they offer. This allows people to print out this nicely formatted document ot read and find all the information they would want and need to know about the vacation they would like to go on. PDF's are extremely useful in providing much information and many sites offer them about all sorts of things. The only problem is you may not find the document just navigating throughout their entire site, but this trick mentioned above makes it a whole world easier to find them.

All of these tricks above I personally find to be extremely useful in my never ending quest to find more information. Please go out and use these things I taught you next time you are trying to use the internet as a means to gather information and knowledge. I promise you will find them useful and uncover useful and cool things you otherwise never would have found.